Goldsworthy,
a Serbian poet who grew up in communist Yugoslavia, and, later,
emigrated to London, has captured and chronicled the themes of love,
loss, memory, and rediscovery that originated from a summer spent in
Greek Macedonia (“Salonika” is an ancient name for Thessaloniki),
thirty years previous.

Salonika,
as Goldsworthy notes in her
afterward, is a cultural gateway to The Balkans; this is the perfect
backdrop for Goldsworthy to set up a dual travelogue; the
outward landscape mirrors the poet's internal journey. The poet is
often in the act of departing for other places (“Departure Board,”
“Germany”) or, saying farewell to a loved one/times past
(“Notebooks,” “Yugoslav Noctures”). The best poems, in my
opinion, are the ones where Goldsworthy engages in the act of
transformation; her own, while at the same time, acknowledges the
transformations of those persons in her life who no longer fit the
familiar boundaries the mind employs to solidify relationships, as in
the poem, “He Stands so Thin and Waits”:

I'm
not often bowled over by a poet's use of language (in this case,
English) that's not written in their native tongue. Oftentimes, poets
for whom English is not their native language rely on the help of
translators, or, spend a great deal of time carefully constructing
poems that are burdened with layers of scholarly formalism. That
can't be said of Salonika. Goldsworthy
has transformed the guttural soul of English into something finer,
more lovely than English has a right to be, yet, her poetry is
immediate and accessible, as in the poem “Out of the Blue”: